


The Funnel of Love

by zambla



Category: Naruto
Genre: Bondage, D/s, M/M, Power Dynamics, Trust, Wax Play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 10:50:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15362931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/zambla
Summary: Tenzō returns from a mission and finds a note. Kakashi does something he has never done before.Or, a meditation on the self and the lover.





	The Funnel of Love

  


 

 

 

Danzō once explained to him, during one of his solemn surveillances in the labyrinthine tunnels of Foundation’s headquarters, that the strongest weapon in war was propaganda.  
   
Tenzō (he was not named such then; he was only a number, though prime among them) had looked up, not understanding. “I thought it was shinobi—our power.”  
   
“But why should shinobi move according to the motions allotted to them, if they are so powerful? Why do they obey? Who allots the motions? Who directs the darkness? Ninja are limbs. The mind moves them. Propaganda is the systemic deployment of illusions, and illusions are the most effective taskmasters of all.  
   
“Our world is filled with illusions, Kinoe.” Danzō’s cane had tapped slowly along the curving corridor, its echo a half-step behind them. “The border is an illusion. The Daimyō is an illusion. The Hokage, the Fire Country, the Stone. All illusions. For what makes Konoha a village—what keeps its people held together in its matrix?  
   
“Kinoe, remember that illusions are not lies. Illusions are the most real things we have. Illusions move our hands. A shinobi bleeds for them. Dies for them. And unlike a genjutsu, there is no release from them, no end. _That_ is what the Foundation is. This is what Hiruzen cannot understand. We serve in the darkness so the illusion cannot break, we prop up their projections with our bodies.”  
   
That was ages ago, years. He had been so young then, still under the microscopic scrutiny of Danzō’s hermetically constructed facility. And this idea—this idea was dangerous. Was incendiary. This idea led him to defect, to break out of Danzō’s clutches altogether. It was not that Danzō was wrong—Danzō was rarely wrong, rarely missed anything—but Danzo was not right either, because as he grew up Tenzō came to know that he could trade one illusion for another, that there were better visions, better worlds, that the awfulness of their illusions was the central lack of their world, the root of banality and evil, that the imagination could triumph, that there was always an alternative. He spent a long time diving into its words after that night, turning it over, deconstructing its axioms and rotating its words along their axes.  
   
—  
   
It was the day after Tenzō came back from a sojourn into Water Country that he found it. Taped to the outside of his apartment door, a single paper folded in half. He had just gone down to the market to get food—what, twenty minutes ago?—and there it was. When opened it simply read: “Tonight?” He flipped the paper around but there was nothing on the back.  
   
“Kakashi-senpai,” he muttered, tearing the tape from his door. He looked back over the railing of his apartment, into the morning sky. He wondered if Kakashi was out there, watching him. Or maybe he had one of his ninkens do this, a bullet in a long list of errands: _pick up the mail, check if the bookstore down the street has restocked their_ Icha Icha yet _, see if Tenzō is around_.  
  
It started quite utilitarian, their mutual affection, beginning during a failed mission when Tenzō, almost chakra exhausted, had to be extracted from the frontlines personally by his captain. Tenzō had drifted in and out of sleep, being carried on Kakashi’s back, and apparently had said much though remembered little.  
  
Afterwards, that night—or maybe it was the next night, hard to say—Kakashi had sat down by him on his bed and gently asked him if he wanted Kakashi to kiss him. What else could he answer? It progressed from there into something loosely defined, something more complicated than a kiss.  
  
Since Kakashi’s retirement they had seen far less of each other—for sex or otherwise. Truth be told Tenzō knew little still about Kakashi outside their dalliances and their history in Anbu. He had long known how not to desire something he could never have. The trick was not to cultivate it—not to let it furrow in you too deeply, too indelibly.  
  
And whether it was the obedience inured by a lifetime of service in Anbu and Foundation, or whether it was something else, whenever Kakashi-senpai had invited, he unfailingly answered.  
  
—  
  
Konoha was still in the embrace of summer. On rainless nights heat clung to the cement streets like the skin of a peach. Kakashi’s apartment was a bit of a climb—set on a foothill in the sparser and quieter part of town, on a bight in the street that overlooked a small drop. A few late buntings chattered on the dogwood outside Kakashi’s building, picking at its berries. The sun had just set. The shivery song of a lone magpie filtered through the distance like a strange herald-call. No one else was about.  
  
His raised his knuckle to the door but thought better of it at the last minute.  
  
Lowering his hand to the doorknob he found that it was not locked. He pushed it open.  
  
“Kakashi-senpai?” he called.  
  
There was no response, only a pleasant quiet. It was cool and still inside.  
  
“I’m coming in,” he said quietly to himself.  
  
—  
  
Upstairs it was dark in the room. What Kakashi had been doing in the darkness, he did not know. The low table that was usually in the center of the room was pushed to the side. Kakashi sat in a chair at back, under the window that opened to the town below, watching him.  
  
“Welcome back,” he said, his voice low and even.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
Through the half-drawn curtains he could see the fine cobalt blue of the evening sky and the soft blush of cirrus clouds that clung to the sunset’s last refraction. The village was already lighting up with shops and streetlamps. Tenzō felt buoyed by the quiet darkness of the room, calm, reflective, as if they could say anything to each other, as if anything could happen.  
  
Kakashi was not wearing his hitai-ate, and loose strands of his hair fell like fronds about his face.  
  
Several _warousoku_ were laid out on the table, their rough surfaces catching the remnants of daylight. All were pale white, slender in the middle and widening at either end. Kakashi favored them for their times together, for they burned brightly and prettily for a hour or so, and that span was a predictable temporal boundary both of them could work with.  
  
All except the red one, which was for something else. It was impossible to tell Kakashi’s expression in the shadows.  
  
“How are you?”  
  
“I’m—good, Kakashi-senpai.”  
  
Desire was a funny thing, unlike any other force known to man—gaining in power as distance increased, an inharmonic kind of power—so that in his absence Kakashi did not dwindle, did not dim, but grew finer, brighter, and less ordinary. Not that Hatake Kakashi was ever ordinary. Not that Tenzō could ordain such a construct for him, nor place him in any sequence, and yet when Kakashi was not near he thought of him, thought of him often, thought of him perhaps best in the night’s quiet privation, thought of him again and again.  
  
What would this be called, yet again, an illusion? Because within sight of him, within his touch, Tenzō knew Kakashi was perfectly normal, perfectly mortal.  
  
There was a faint hiss, and then Kakashi’s face was lit up by the flare of a struck match.  
  
His eye was flat like a coin. A depthless charge of darkness in the pale sliver of his face.  
  
As Kakashi put the match to the candle, it leapt into life, first blue then intense and bright, the fire shinning through its pale cup, a long trembling flame drawn upwards through the air like a petal of light. Kakashi carefully lit another, then another, and set them on the table. One he kept on a dish in his hand. The red one he left alone.  
  
Tenzō could see more clearly now. Kakashi was in dressed only in his jōnin shirtsleeves and pants. He was barefoot and bare-handed, his easy smile hidden by his mask. “Hungry?”  
  
To the best of his knowledge, Tenzō was invited over for a fucking—not a meal. “I’m fine, senpai.”  
  
Kakashi walked towards him, the flame shifting their shadows. It faintly smelled of the ripening _urushi_ tree. Kakashi laid the candle-dish on a shelf. He came up to Tenzō and gently cradled his shoulder in his hand. His one open eye was impossible to read. “I missed you.”  
  
“I’ve not been gone that long.”  
  
“Maa, I don’t see you as it is.”  
  
They were suddenly so close. It was true. They had not seen each other in a few months. Kakashi had not been solicitous and Tenzō—well, Tenzō would never presume.  
  
“I’m glad you came.”  
  
“Of course I came.”  
  
A silence. A shifting of the shadows. They were adjusting their bodies, like two stars drawing near each other.  
  
There was always an awkwardness in the beginning, a restlessness in his limbs he can only dispel with contact, a terror in his lungs he could only work through with a kiss.  
  
Kakashi leaned in—close, closer. The pad of Kakashi’s thumb at his jaw. His breath hot at his ear. Tenzō dragged his hand slowly up Kakashi’s chest, feeling the muscles and their easy power. He was already aroused—just by the closeness of him, the rawness. He moved to unzip his own jacket.  
  
A hand stopped him.  
  
“Tenzō. Would you like to try something different tonight? I think, tonight, I want to be in your power.”  
  
The request—mild in Kakashi’s mouth—was like a shot of adrenaline. Volatile. Almost debilitating.  
  
“What do you think?” Kakashi asked again.  
  
He did not quite know what to say. They were shinobi and their world was rife with illusions. Kakashi’s face was still next to his, out of his view. Tenzō held his breath.  
  
Power was something Kakashi had never lacked, for he was exacting in everything he did. Power was something Kakashi wielded with supreme finesse, something Tenzō could not imagine Kakashi without. And his own power—well, his own power was different from Kakashi’s, slower, more measured. And his own power was what Kakashi wanted.  
  
Something different.  
  
His hand settled on Kakashi’s chest again. He felt the heart. It was, to his surprise, beating fast like his own.  
  
“Yes. Yes, I can do that. I want to do that.”  
  
He lifted his hand to brush at the skin of Kakashi’s cheek exposed above the mask—he could only guess at the expression underneath it. He cradled Kakashi’s face, meeting eye to eye.  
  
Indeed there was something different there, the kernel of a feeling, a feeling that Tenzō did not yet know.  
  
Before this their times together were under Kakashi’s direction, Kakashi’s control. Tenzō knew it was because his captain was a careful man, never wanting to reveal more than he ought, and always knowing he ought to reveal very little. He was resigned to the fact that to love Kakashi was to love with a distance inside you, for Kakashi lived beyond his reach, by word or limb.  
  
And as for Tenzō: he rarely desired something he could not have.  
  
So when he started, he started at the beginning.  
  
Tenzō slowly turned Kakashi until he faced the back of the room where the candles shivered brightly, echoing their movement. He watched the way their light danced on the dark fabric of Kakashi’s uniform, black overlain in black, subtlety upon subtlety.  
  
Gently he stroked Kakashi’s hair, his brows, his jaw. Slowly he slid down the mask, down to his collar.  
  
Kakashi’s face was a perpetual revelation, astonishing for its rarity. A beauty assembled not of its component parts: straight symmetry marred by a long scar, nose and mouth in exacting proportions, sharp eyes under long brows. It was a beauty possessed of itself, grown into its full capacity, no longer considering its own power. He was streaked with the flickering glance of the flames, his skin glimmering, his hair caught in light, and shadows before him, shadows behind him, he looked like some godly creature come to life, some devil.  
  
Tenzō wanted him immediately, wanted him badly, in any way available.  
  
His fingers roamed over Kakashi’s face. He pressed his finger into Kakashi’s lips. He pulled at the long collar of his shirt, biting into his shoulder, dipping his hands inside the shirt to feel the body underneath. He ran his tongue up Kakashi’s neck, around his pulsing throat, mesmerized by its hollow shadows.  
  
And Kakashi, true to his word, let Tenzō move him as he chose, desire like a haze softening his eye and slackening his face.  
  
“Undress for me.”  
  
Kakashi immediately did, the barest of hesitation showing in his deft hands. He watched Tenzō the entire time with his one open eye. His lifted the hem of his shirt and drew it off his head, flinging it towards a corner of the room. He then unbuttoned and zipped down his pants, stepping out of them to stand naked before Tenzō, as if ready for inspection. Kakashi was already half-hard, and his body—his shield and weapon—strong, taut, dangerous.  
  
If Kakashi’s face would surprise Tenzō with the suddenness of its beauty, Kakashi’s body was the opposite: a comfort, a familiarity. For this body Tenzō knew best, beside his own. It was the body they both trained, a tool they both honed, a body his body knew and worked with and fought with and bled with. They had stood countless times, back to back, communicating with only their chakras and movements. Kakashi’s body was a deer and a wolf. The long, bounding grace of the deer. The killer in the wolf.  
  
Tenzō placed both his palms on Kakashi’s chest, feeling the hard heartbeat locked in his ribcage. He felt oddly self-conscious, being completely clothed, jacketed, next to Kakashi’s nakedness.  
  
“Don’t move.”  
  
He brought Kakashi’s arms together behind his back.  
  
Mokuton was truly a splendid skill. With a twist of his hand a tendril of wood sprouted from his palm. It wrapped around Kakashi’s wrists, one and then the other, interleaving between them as to make a set of seamless cuffs that trapped them in a figure-eight. It had the dense, smooth grain of dogwood, polished by Tenzō’s chakra to the softness of skin. Kakashi wriggled his hands, his fingertips straining to trace its surface.  
  
“Very pretty,” Kakashi said, twisting his head, smirking.  
  
Tenzō remembered the first time he had used mokuton to bind Kakashi. In the darksome cavern filled with desperation and smoke and the laughter of Yukimi so limpid and pure he had wondered how she could be so happy, having lived like him, all his life in darkness. It was a hard memory to dig up. The one who’d given him his name, the first person he’d loved. And the second, here before him.  
  
“Don’t move.” Tenzō repeated. He grabbed Kakashi by the chin and straightened his head. Kakashi let his smirk fade and slowly closed his eye.  
  
Tenzō wanted to push him down to the ground, had wanted to since he stepped into the room. He wanted to fuck him, drive into him, feel his body’s grip and heat like a glove.  
  
But that was not what Kakashi had asked.  
  
With some force he leaned up and licked Kakashi’s mouth, licked it open, licked the inside of his teeth, and letting Kakashi catch all their weight he pressed his open mouth on him and drove him backwards with kisses.  
  
It was a special pleasure, kissing Kakashi, whose mouth he never really got to see as much as he liked, whose mouth was arch and hot and sharp and wry, whose mouth moved with his, like Kakashi knew him, like he also thought of Tenzō on nights filled with nothing else, thought of them, thought of this kiss again and again and again.  
  
When they broke apart Kakashi was messy with saliva, and Tenzō was breathing fast.  
  
He stood back, studying him. He finally took off his flak jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Kakashi was far from his usual calm. He looked like a man awaiting reckoning, a man awaiting pleasure.  
  
Tenzō lowered his mouth onto Kakashi’s chest, nipping at it with his teeth, and licking it after, letting his hands caress up and down his body: his soft fleshy flank, the hard muscles of his arms, the looser skin of his belly, his nipples, the ridge of his hips, his hot cock, the small wiry hairs of his legs. He lowered his head to bite Kakashi’s nipple, and suddenly he grabbed Kakashi’s ass and drove their bodies together, pressing into bare skin the rough fabric of his jōnin uniform. His own erection digging into Kakashi’s thigh.  
  
Kakashi gave a sound that was awfully close to a whimper.  
  
“On your knees.”  
  
Kakashi’s eye was open again. It was trained on him, unwavering under his gaze. Gracefully he bent both his knees and dropped before him.  
  
It was almost too much, seeing Kakashi kneel so easily, so readily. He clenched his teeth, willing some patience into himself.  
  
It was funny. In all their times together Tenzō could not remember if he ever got to see Kakashi like this. Not only of him in supplication—a rare sight—but to see him up close under his own whim, to be the one to control the flow of time between them. He wanted to touch Kakashi—to touch all of him, all over. He wondered if that is what Kakashi wanted—to transform the distance between them but not to decimate it.  
  
Lifting his hand he touched the orbit that held the Sharingan, laid his fingers on its eyelid. He felt it flutter like a pulse. Suddenly an image of how Kakashi might have acquired it came into his mind—a darksome night, blood, somber silence, a friend dying, the rain outside fading with thunder. He withdrew his hand. There were no rules between them like this—and yet there were silent assents, and though war forever hovered above them like a cage, it was not allowed in this room, at least by name.  
  
“Open this.”  
  
They both wanted something different.  
  
Kakashi slowly opened his Sharingan. In its intricately triplicated _tomoe_ Tenzō saw a gleam of something dangerous, something wild, as he always did when he glimpsed its depths. What did it mean—to want a person? How can you want an entire person? He felt as he had never felt before, never this precisely—the feeling as as new as it was insurgent—a desire he knew was inside him all along, waiting for a key.  
  
He let his feelings sink beneath the surface, into the depths of some dark reservoir where they could admix and sprout and ripen.  
  
He reached behind Kakashi’s ear and stroked the fine velvety hairs there. He dug his hands through the hair, long and flopping all about Kakashi’s face, using his nails to drag on the scalp, grabbing a fistful to test Kakashi’s responsiveness.  
  
With one hand he undid his fly on his jōnin pants—he wore no underwear for the night. He grasped his erection and stroked it.  
  
“I want to you to suck me off,” Tenzō said, lowly, with a grin in his voice, dragging Kakashi’s face closer by the nape, aroused beyond measure by the way he looked on his knees, torso sloped, his arms bent back and his large, clever hands bound into a slender line. Downy light from the candles suffused his skin and swam into the darkness. The fine chamfers of his shoulders shifted as he raised his face.  
  
“ _Hai_.” Kakashi said, his voice as still as stone, and leaned into Tenzō’s touch.  
  
A slow lick, broad and warm. The tongue slid under his cock and cradled it as Kakashi shuffled forward, awkward without his hands. Kakashi stopped to take a slow breath, then wrapped his lips all the way around Tenzō’s cock, gently sucking it in. Tenzō could see the small extrinsic muscles of Kakashi’s back gliding in the light as he worked, trying to find a good angle. Kakashi was looking up at him attentively with his black eye, the Sharingan closed again.  
  
Tenzō let out a small groan. The pleasure was immediate and intense. Kakashi’s mouth felt so fucking good. He wanted to bury his hands in Kakashi’s hair, to shove his cock forward until Kakashi could feel the fabric of his pants against his face.  
  
But Tenzō stepped back and took his cock out of Kakashi’s mouth.  
  
“Uhnn—” Kakashi made a sound.  
  
Tenzō spun around the kneeling Kakashi, standing now with his hips behind Kakashi’s eyeline, forcing his head back roughly until it leaned against Tenzō’s belly. Tenzō’s nestled his cock into Kakashi’s silver hair.  
  
He bent Kakashi’s face up by his hair—and briefly wondered what power symmetry had, what power geometry, to make him feel yet like lightning by the merest flash of that face. His hands traced its features of their self-accord—symmetry and geometry cut out of light, made out of skin, Kakashi’s mismatched eyes trembling and glistening and glazed with pleasure, his nose an even scarp against the darkness, his lips red with effort. Tenzō touched the sharp angles of his jaw, the dull tissue of his scar.  
  
There was a feeling, an alien feeling. It was violent and tender. It made Tenzō’s chest tighten.  
  
He desperately wanted to feel the living inside Kakashi’s body, to watch himself, to kneel bound and waiting, to replicate his beauty—and by the same impulse he wanted nothing better than to touch Kakashi with his own flesh, to pleasure him, to caress his body like a thin veil of air, to command and subdue, to give him pain and pleasure until he was panting with it, hungry with it.  
  
“What do you see?” Kakashi said.  
  
Tenzō was fast. He grabbed Kakashi by the throat, jamming his thumb and index finger firmly under the twin nodes of chakra beneath the mandible, his other hand open and splayed, crawling down Kakashi’s face like a mask. Over his fluttering eyes, over his eager breath. He plunged two fingers into his mouth.  
  
Kakashi’s throat spasmed before he calmed himself. The expression Kakashi made was so surprised and intense and masculine Tenzō almost hesitated in his movements. But his fingers moved forward—Kakashi’s teeth parted for them, his tongue moved around them, his mouth softened, his eyes slid shut. It was warm, so wet and warm—a delicate heat that each person carried within themself.  
  
He slowly moved his hand and out and in again, disappearing down the mouth. Kakashi made a soft gagging sound. His nails caught on Kakashi’s lips and teeth. It was beyond hot. Tenzō repeated the motion as if he was retrieving something precious, each time feeling the pliant tongue, the hard palate, the soft throat, and each time coming up wet and empty.  
  
He watched the way Kakashi relaxed completely, his face straining up like he wanted to catch the light, or receive with his body some meteors of regard or tenderness. Moans continued to escape from Kakashi, half pleasure and half discomfort. He had opened both his eyes again—the Sharingan and its dark twin staring up at Tenzō like two moons, unmoving, inscrutable, relentless. Mesmerized, Tenzō closed his palm around Kakashi’s throat as if to squeeze it but merely held it still with his hands. Kakashi felt vulnerable, precious.  
  
That feeling inside him bubbled up and multiplied. It felt like his mind had gained eyes beyond his own—and before him there was a kaleidoscope of vistas, roads, airs gathering between them, and he fancied he could see the rivers of their chakras, the slow swirl of pleasure like a curling vector field, from source to sink, from sink to source. He saw himself, saw Kakashi, saw through upturned eyes and downward glance. He saw through the candle, saw through the air, saw through the tricky pupil of the summer moon outside. _I want to feel your mouth, your throat. I want to feel inside you with my hands, my cock. I want to measure how just warm you are, just how hot. I want all distance eradicated—to extract a careful kind of pain of you, to open it like a flower, to find suffused in its heart my pleasure, my endless pleasure. Like this: pleasure and pain are reciprocals, entwined and difficult and enduring._  
  
Tenzō clenched his jaw and released his hands. Kakashi made a sound.  
  
“Would you like to fuck my throat?” His voice raw and unsteady.  
  
He was under Kakashi’s spell—his control, and the realization made his heart hot and his head burn. “ _Oh god_ ,” he said aloud, though he did not mean to. His cock twitched at the back of Kakashi’s head. Suddenly he felt like he had lost the thread he had so carefully found in among the warp and heft of his emotions, because his hands were gripped tight in Kakashi’s hair, yanking his head to the side, and Tenzō fought an urge to drape himself on Kakashi’s body, to kiss him everywhere, to beg off his tenderness, to reverse this strange entanglement and not feel this new, this open. This was not as he had expected—it was not an essay on power, or control, but something closer, some other delicious illusion, more real than anything else he has ever felt.  
  
Tenzō breathed deeply. He let go of Kakashi altogether.  
  
He walked away and sat himself down on the chair—in exactly the position he had found Kakashi earlier in the evening. The candles were now half-burned. Limpid wax gathered in the hot cup of the candle, trembling like tears in the light.  
  
“Kakashi. _Senpai_.” Tenzō’s voice was calm and deep, without incitement or malice. Kakashi’s breath came evenly but heavily. “I want you to crawl to me.”  
  
Kakashi’s head was bowed and his eyes were hidden by his hair.  
  
Kakashi was beautiful. He was roguishly beautiful. Unerringly beautiful. The sort of beauty that was effortless in its imagination, moving from beautiful motion to beautiful stillness. Shadows danced on his face and rove through his hair. His torso and his limbs, his hard cock, his thighs.  
  
Desire pulsed through him like a spike of sumptuous poison.  
  
The room was not small, and Kakashi had to make it all the way across—maybe some fifteen, twenty feet. With his hands still bound behind him the crawling would be difficult—but Kakashi was nothing if not graceful and clever. He straightened his back and canted his shoulders forward for balance. Slowly he scraped forward, his knees catching each time on the hardwood floor.  
  
“Look at me.”  
  
Kakashi raised his face and the dark coin of his eye tilted into the light—thin and dangerous.  
  
And dangerous he was—he was still Kakashi of the Sharingan. He could undo any of Tenzō’s jutsu or bonds or expectations with a word and a glance.  
  
“ _Hai_ , Tenzō.”  
  
Tenzō drew in a loud breath.  
  
Maybe two words, two glances.  
  
He could not look away either.  
  
When Kakashi made it across the room Tenzō was stroking himself. He could not keep the arousal from his own face.  
  
What was in this spell? What exchange was this? He had spent so long as a young man trying to earn Kakashi’s approval—and yet that was easily given, for Kakashi found the merits and strengths of others readily, even if he did not show it. So what was it that he wanted, besides respect, besides companionship, besides their nights in this apartment—love, more love, a different kind of love? What loves were available for people like them?  
  
_Where is the person who you love—when is he? Is he the one who first scanned you out of the darkness, a red gleam in his eye, who stood over you as lightning fell like rain from his hands, who pulled out out of the snake, out of the ground, out of the grave? Is he the one who was comrade and leader, fair and subtle, power in his limbs and order in his voice? Is he the he here, naked, unafraid, unresisting, he who sat in this chair when your positions were reversed, looking at you like an imperious master?_  
  
_Or is he the you now, as he sees you now, above him, before him, as clothed as he is naked, you as he saw you all those years ago, you on your back in a clearing in the forest where you had failed your mission, awaiting sentence, awaiting death, and leaves floated between you like memories?_  
  
It took Tenzō a lifetime to understand that memories were not a set of stamps pressed into the grooves of time, not a photo album, but a series of unwindings from a cosmic fabric—and how had he ever thought he would be able to control time, its flows, ebbs, its progression from originations to infinities. How had he not swam down those other streams, where other Kakashis served other Konohas and fought in other wars in other borders and other Tenzōs were found or not found or died or not died—  
   
This was the only life, only body. A singularity. A miracle. A love and a pleasure to be anything at all.  
  
Love among shinobi, it seemed, bore out of wounds, like the gashes you have to cut to graft a scion to a tree. They would not speak of the war in this room, but it spoke of them—for they made up its lexicography. Shinobi endured—that was in their name. Shinobi suffered—that was in their nature. And Tenzō had always known that even pleasure was something to be endured.  
   
He reached out with his other hand and worked his fingers through Kakashi’s hair, puppy-soft and damp, and pulled his head in—he wanted to smell him, that spot at the top of his head that smelled most like him. And then, with a vicious twist, he pulled Kakashi’s face into his lap.  
   
Kakashi opened his mouth immediately—was slack and wet and ready for him. His gaze was tense, brilliant, like a comet’s sweep in the black night, flung out behind its careening path everything from love to desire to tenderness, tenderness.  
   
Tenzō let his head sink backwards into the chair, letting Kakashi drape over his lap, supporting his weight. It was so much. His hand pressed Kakashi’s head down as he drove his hips up—moaning as he felt the indistinguishable heat of the lips, the tongue, the soft convulsing throat. Kakashi gagged for a few thrusts but then moved of his own accord. Tenzō looked down, marveling at the sight, the kind of fluster he only saw in Kakashi when he was in the battlefield pressed by an enemy of his own caliber. But the angle was too awkward—  
   
With some small effort he he eased a leg under him, half-kneeling up and straightening them both. Cradling Kakashi with both hands he drove his cock down again.  
   
Tenzō did not know if Kakashi was supremely experienced or supremely controlled, or both, but his throat slackened and soon they both found a rhythm—thick saliva dripped down his cock and Kakashi’s face, down through the pant of his kneeling leg—heat and pleasure, pleasure after pleasure—and when he opened his eyes he could only groan to see Kakashi in such a mess, such a state—his glottal sounds choked off by the hard pace—it felt like falling, and soaring, like reaching—it was so much, so much, his mind was so bare it could not hold onto anything else. Tenzō tightened like a bow and he came.  
   
Kakashi’s mouth. He let go of his grip in the hair and slipped his cock out. Sweat running down Kakashi’s neck. His face slick with come and saliva. His lone eye fixed on him, and what was in it? It seemed to contain some unmeasured want and need. Tenzō bent down and kissed his brows—salty and wet—kissed the round orbit of his eyes and felt the flutter of his lashes with his lips.  
   
Then he kissed Kakashi on the mouth, long and deep, all his weight bearing down, his limbs heavy and fettered and full of love.  
   
He was tired of this dance, tired of the distance, tired of playing. This was the part in the Noh play where you realize the mask and the face could not be cloven—that the actor was both shadow and light—that desire is both in and out of your control, its origination codependent, cocreated. Sometimes to give and to receive were the same, and in some sliver of time the subject and the object could reach each other, nose to nose, like lovers. The room tensed with delight, straining against the supports, the air, space itself. The candle flames shifted but even they could not move the walls with their wild, votive desires.  
   
Gently he released the cuffs that held Kakashi’s hands. Kakashi’s shoulders immediately slumped forward, trying to work out the strain, but before he could get comfortable Tenzō pushed him down onto the ground. He spread his arms out and bound them again with more restraints, affixing them to the floor.  
   
“Kakashi—”  
   
He realized how sweaty he was, how labored his breathing, how choked his voice. He knelt over Kakashi, still in his uniform pants, though now his fly was open, his erection subsided, and his legs loosened from their bindings.  
   
The red candle was on the table next to them. Tenzō held it up to the lit flame. Kakashi drew a breath.  
   
It was smoother than the others, its wax softer. It seemed to already melt in his hands.  
   
Slowly he lifted it above Kakashi’s torso, waited for the wax to pool, and tilted. Something opened up in Kakashi’s face—  
   
“Ahh—”  
   
One drop, then another.  
   
Tenzō formed a seal with his hands. A branch sprung out of the floor and curled above Kakashi. He moved the candle and the branch wrapped around it, stilled. Wax dripped down of its own accord, falling unpredictably by subtle movements of the wooden holder.  
   
And from Kakashi: cries, whimpers, compressed with need.  
   
Red petals opened like wounds on Kakashi’s chest. Each time a drip of wax fell his arms bucked loudly against their constraints. He was sensitive when he wanted to be.  
   
Wordlessly Tenzō lifted Kakashi’s long legs. Putting them over his shoulders he ran his flat palms over the shins, their fine hairs brushing together, muscles tightening under sharp bones. He tucked a hand under his ass to support its weight.  
   
He dipped his head. Blowing Kakashi was one of his favorite things, something he cherished, something he took care to do. Keeping his eyes on Kakashi’s face he first held his tongue to the tip of the cock, softly swirling around the head. Salty, slightly wet. A feathering touch.  
   
“ _Tenzō—_ " Kakashi sighed, his stomach taut with tension.  
   
He cradled Kakashi’s balls in his hand, thumbing along the delicate flesh that separated them. Tenzō raised his head and wet his index finger in his mouth. He found Kakashi’s asshole and slowly pressed in. Kakashi gasped, sounding a little broken. Tenzō pushed on, past to his first knuckle, wishing he had found better lubrication to begin with and wrapping his mouth around Kakashi’s cock again.  
   
Slowly he worked. When he was sufficiently deep he curled his finger and Kakashi’s hips kicked up, smashing his cock against his tongue. Tenzō twisted his chakra and more wood crept up from the floorboards, vines and branches, curling around Kakashi’s thighs to both hold them up and keep his hips from moving. Tenzō lowered Kakashi’s feet to the floor and more branches bound them. He was now half-held up and bent backwards like a lyre, all the weight of his torso bearing on his shoulders while the candle above him continued to burn.  
   
What a thing he looked, his entire body spread open. His head flushed from the position. His chest was half-covered now—crimson up to his belly. As if an inflorescence above him had shivered in a sudden breeze and shed all its petals.  
   
The wax on his nipples would require delicate removal later.  
   
Tenzō continued the blowjob, taking the head of the cock into his mouth, now sucking in earnest, using his tongue as he worked his head and his finger in unison.  
   
There were no more sounds, no more gasps of surprise or pain. Kakashi was staring up at him down the bridge of his nose, his face flushed, both his eyes open, almost angry. There were tears in his eyes.  
   
Inside a secret another secret.  
   
The holder above Kakashi trembled. Wax fell like rain.  
   
Wax like blood. Thick and red. Dyed with safflower seeds from mountains in the north where poor farm girls picked them out of tall unending fields until their fingers were bleeding. That was the redness, the color.  
   
Kakashi came in his mouth, soundlessly, his entire body tensing.  
   
There is a certain ugliness to people orgasming—an indescribable tumult. Kakashi was no different. All his limbs wrested against their holders, his chakra flaring, almost dazzling enough to cut through the bonds. His chest heaved, trying to move. The long muscles of his legs spasmed, plucked like harpstrings. His teeth clenched white and sharp and his canines caught on his lips. Like he was trying to withhold, to abjure against the pleasure. It was mesmerizingly ugly, freeingly ugly. Tenzō swallowed what he could and wiped away the rest. It tasted bitter and sour.  
   
They paused like that for a while. Kakashi still bent backwards, Tenzō kneeling between his legs. Then the branches retreated, the bonds dissolved, lowering Kakashi by one leg and then the other.  
   
Tenzō wondered whether their times together were a distraction or a mediation. Tenzō wondered if he would ever get to see Kakashi again, like this, precisely like this, no more than this, no less.  
   
What did it mean to want a person? To want an entire person?  
   
“Kiss me.”  
   
And Kakashi did as he was told, firmly holding Tenzō’s hand.  
   
—  
   
Afterwards Tenzō used the dull edge of a dagger to scrape the wax from Kakashi. They dried into flat, bevelled shapes—or else plump teardrops where they rolled off his body.  
   
“You know, I’ve never done this before.” Kakashi said quietly, rubbing his left wrist, along the large stripe of red, compressed flesh, then absently picking at the patches of still-dried wax on his chest.  
   
How strange. Tenzō thought at first he meant the submission, the wax, the relinquishing of control. But then his body shuddered with the feeling, and he thought he could feel in it a strand of Kakashi’s chakra, indomitable and electric. It felt familiar, and yet—  
   
How strange, that after all it was still Tenzō who felt like he had been the supplicant, the petitioner, the one bound, the one begging, the one who had received his measures and more, the one gorged with pain and surfeited with pleasure. It felt as if he found himself following a road, misty and wet with recent rain, knowing neither origin nor destination, his only guide the fluttering echoes of his predecessor. On this road you might meet a ghost. On this road you might be ambushed. On this road you might be already dead, a shuriken in your skull too fast for you to dodge. On this road you might find a flower stranger than you could imagine, its bewildering phyllotaxis yielding even stranger fruit. On this road you might end up at the ocean, falling to your knees because its largeness overwhelmed you, its power. It lapped at him. An ocean brimmed with feeling.  
   
“Me neither. I’ve never done this before either.”  
   
“Thank you.” Kakashi was smiling. He kissed Tenzō’s forehead. Wearily he picked himself up and stretched like an animal. “I’m gonna take a shower and get all this off.”  
   
—  
   
By morning Kakashi was gone before him.  
   
Tenzō had long thought it strange how early Kakashi woke, even on his days off, given how incorrigibly late he was to every meeting. But then he supposed that Kakashi had his secrets and routines that neither rain nor snow nor time could shift.   
   
He stayed in the bed, savoring the warmth.  
   
His memory of the previous night was already fading. He remembered some mechanics of their bodies, what he did with his hands, his cock, how Kakashi had looked, kneeling in the light, how fucking him had felt—but that other feeling, that alien, singular feeling, that feeling he could only later describe as reciprocality, as a mirror, as floating, he knew he could have of it only the memory of a memory, though it was the thing he wanted to hold onto the most. The exact forking path that lead his mind to its garden was not charted, and even having glimpsed it he could not hoard its secrets for himself.  
   
But in its wake was an ache, a pain bound to his chest that flared sometimes in the lone worn night, a broken compass without the power of Kakashi. Illusions were not lies. They were as ironclad as any cage.  
   
And it was later—months later, years later, when the reflexive impulse finally matured into something else, something more acute, when he thought again about this episode, this night, later when his nights with Kakashi had ceased altogether because his students had preoccupied much of his time and his heart, when illusions collided and Konoha threatened to fall apart, when Team 7 was in need of a new leader—he had the gentle realization that what Kakashi had given him, had continuously given him, were what flakes of his life he could—and even a morsel of which was precious, infinitely precious.  
   
They say that desire is a two-way street—but in fact it is a path integral: a meandering labor of sums and traversals, a calculation of all the infinite links between two points of the universe, fixed or orbiting, turbulent or silent.  
   
When Tenzō was washed and dressed, and the sun already a hour’s span above the horizon, when the shimmering whistle of the waxwing called outside the window, he carefully fetched from his flak jacket the note he had found on his door the morning before, drew a doodle of a face on its back, and left it on Kakashi’s kitchen counter.

 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> 1\. “Funnel of Love” is a Wanda Jackson song. It was slowed down and covered by Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL for “Only Lovers Left Alive,” the vampire film we all deserve that’s less about blood and lust and more about life and beauty.
> 
> 2\. I will have to suppose that someone had invented QED techniques in the shinobi scientific lexicon for the final metaphor to make sense—let us suppose so.
> 
> 3\. “a flake of your life” is a phrase from L. Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”
> 
> 4\. “a pleasure to be anything at all” is a phrase adapted from Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea,” which in turn is possibly borrowed from Lewis Carroll.
> 
> 5\. The doodle at the end is probably a [henohenomoheji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henohenomoheji), often used for the faces of scarecrows---or, you know, Kakashi.


End file.
